Programme available - Faceted Classification Today - London, 14-15 September

The International UDC Seminar 2017 Faceted Classification Today: Theory, Technology and End Users will take place in London on 14-15 September 2017 at Wellcome Collection.

Seminar 2017 revisits faceted analytical theory as a method for (re)constructing modern analytico-synthetic classifications and explores potential fields of application for facet analysis in information organization and access.

The conference is aimed at information professionals, researchers, lecturers in library and information science and computer science as well as controlled vocabulary developers and designers.

The Seminar's Programme features the most prominent researchers in the field of knowledge organization and classification theory: Richard Smiraglia, Vanda Broughton, Birger Hjørland, Claudio Gnoli, Joseph Tennis, ARD Prasad and  Fausto Giunchiglia, Martin Fricke, Dagobert Soergel, etc.

Invitation: Classification & Authority Control - Lisbon 29-30 October 2015

The International UDC Seminar 2015 entitled "Classification & Authority Control: Expanding Resource Discovery" will take place in The National Library of Portugal in Lisbon, on 29-30 October 2015.

The objective of the conference is to explore issues in managing classification vocabulary in and between information systems. Particular emphasis will be on the possibilities for exploiting and sharing subject authority data in the linked data environment.

Speakers include Michael Buckland, Barbara Tillett, Dagobert Soergel, Rebecca Green, Maja Žumer & Marcia Zeng, Nuno Freire, Maria Inês Cordeiro, Andrea Scharnhorst & Richard Smiraglia, Wolfram Sperber, Koraljka Golub, Claudio Gnoli, Marie Balikova, Victoria Francu.

To learn more about conference programme and to register go to the conference website.
Proceedings are published by Ergon.

Venue:  National Library of Portugal, Campo Grande 83, Lisbon
Conference fee: € 250 (students € 210)

Organizer: UDC Consortium and the National Library of Portugal.

Bibliography of the British Technology Index

BTI bibliography compiled by Keiichi Kawamura was published by Jusonbo Co. Ltd. (Tokyo).
ISBN: 978-4-88367-250-9

"This bibliography lists about 320 references to BTI ranging from 1958 to the present. Eight languages are concerned with the bibliography: English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Spanish and Swedish. Every item has an English abstract or annotation. Items are arranged in systematic order, and cross-references among related items as well as author and language indexes complement the systematic arrangement. A title list of E.J. Coates’ BTI-related works arranged in chronological order is appended."

From the Preface:
"BTI was commenced by the Library Association (LA), London, in February 1962. It was a monthly and annual subject guide to articles in about 400 British technical journals.
...
BTI introduced new techniques which differed from those traditionally used. Societies of professional indexers regarded BTI as ‘an indexing masterpiece’ in the field of science and technology, and Coates was called ‘the genius of subject index.’ His main book was reissued by the same publisher in 1988 at an interval of 28 years. I think that it is time to reappraise BTI as a global standard. The bibliography is compiled for this purpose." (Keiichi Kawamura, 18th June 2015).

Contents:

Preface and acknowledgements
Introduction
Systematic arrangement

00 “Subject catalogues: headings and structure”

10 Prenatal stage and early years of BTI

20 Aspects of BTI

30 Indexing system

40 Computerization

50 User-oriented education and training

60 User study and laboratory evaluation

70 Events following the resignation of the first editor

80 Applications of BTI system including trials and discussions

90 References made to BTI in connection with Ranganathan and CRG

Author index

Language index

Appendix: Title list of Coates’ BTI-related works arranged in chronological order

Publisher: http://www.jusonbo.co.jp.

SEMANTiCS 2015 conference

The Semantic Web Company (SWC) has announced the 11th International Conference on Semantic Systems - SEMANTiCS 2015 - to be held in Vienna, September 15-17, 2015. Calls are now open for research papers, industry presentations, posters and demos. More information is available on the conference web site.

Macmillan Science and Education Publish RDF Ontologies

Macmillan Science and Education have published their RDF ontologies used for content publishing.

They are sharing these in order to contribute to the wider linked data community and to provide a public reference for their data models.

"This May 2015 release further extends the number and size of our published data models. We've added two more domain models: relations and review-states. We've linked our subjects domain model to the NLM MeSH RDF Linked Data (beta) and provided Bio2RDF links as well. We've also displayed instance data for all of the domain models. On top of that we've grown the number of terms from our Core Ontology by more than 50% – see the bar chart below. And we've improved navigation on the core and domain model pages."

See the nature.com site for further information.

Standards, Interoperability and Dewey

Next time the Internet comes crashing down about your ears, spare a thought for the value of standards, starting with TCP/IP and HTTP. When you consider how the superhighway relies on precise implementation of an immense jigsaw of protocols and standards, it’s a miracle we ever find anything. But while we can’t get along without them, standards are also a pain. They push you into one-size-fits-all and clip the wings of dizzy free-fliers.

At ISKO-UK’s Great Debate [1] last February, the international standard ISO 25964 [2] collected a lot of flak from some speakers who wanted their thesauri to escape control, and conversely from others who urged greater discipline, in the style of an ontology. So it was refreshing to attend EDUG’s April workshop [3], where the ISO 25964 guidance on mapping received a grateful welcome.

EDUG is the European Dewey User Group, whose membership includes a great many national libraries and major university libraries. Their patrons want unfettered and uncluttered access, not just to the resources held locally, but to all the collections you can reach through the Internet. Given the multiplicity of different thesauri, subject headings and classification schemes used to index and/or classify the original material, and given the shrinking budgets for re-classifying new acquisitions, mappings between the various vocabularies have been seen as part of the solution.

But mappings are a challenge! Between one thesaurus and another, cases of exact equivalence between concepts are the exception not the rule. Between a thesaurus and a classification scheme there’s an additional complication – the precoordination built into most classes. Thesaurus concepts designed for postcoordinate indexing do not easily map to or from classmarks, originally developed for arranging books on shelves.

While mapping has no easy answers, that does not mean we should give up trying. As Grete Seland quoted from Piet Hein:

Problems worthy of attack

Prove their worth by hitting back.

ISO 25964 sets out basic guidelines, starting with thesauri and reaching part of the way towards classification schemes and other types of Knowledge Organization System (KOS). For some years members of EDUG have been drawing upon these guidelines in projects such as MACS [4], Criss-Cross [5], Coli-conc [6], and a project to map the Norwegian thesaurus Humord to Dewey. Some are looking towards Semantic Web applications; others are simply trying to speed up cataloguing of resources already classified or indexed by a different KOS. In the EDUG forum a big concern is to build all the accumulated knowledge guidance into WebDewey [7].

This workshop in Naples focused specifically on developing recommendations for best practice when mapping to the Dewey Decimal Classification System. Standards were greatly in demand.  Speakers pointed out the limitations of both ISO 25964 and SKOS [8] in this context, but the general conclusion was to build on and extend these standards rather than casting them aside. Detailed conclusions of the four working groups are currently in discussion, and should be published on the website [3] by the end of June 2015.

So come back standards, all is forgiven… for the meantime. And as for the teams developing mappings to Dewey, even when supported by standards, wish them fortitude and a jar of paracetamol as they grapple with the intellectual challenges of mapping to a pre-coordinated scheme.

[1] http://www.iskouk.org/content/great-debate

[2] http://www.niso.org/schemas/iso25964/

[3] http://edug.pansoft.de/tiki-index.php?page=2015meeting

[4] http://www.nb.admin.ch/nb_professionnel/projektarbeit/00729/00733/index.html?lang=en

[5] http://ixtrieve.fh-koeln.de/crisscross/index_en.html

[6] http://www.slainte.org.uk/edug/docs/2012/Balakrishnan-EDUG2012.ppt

[7] http://dewey.org/webdewey/login/login.html

[8] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference

Thesaurus Debate needs to move on

Surprise, surprise - last Thursday's debate on this proposition was a pushover for the opposition. To defeat any argument of the form “XXX has no place in YYY”, all you have to provide is one counter-example.

Just for starters:

•  The UK Data Archive, powered by the HASSET thesaurus
• The FAO’s AGRIS database, searchable using AGROVOC, and
•  EUROVOC, used for searching publications of the EU institutions and others

were among 11 such examples that Leonard Will managed to cram on to one slide. He could have gone on to cite dozens more cases where a thesaurus provides sophisticated and indispensable search capabilities.

The “expert witness” Philip Carlisle backed him up by describing the nine vocabularies and related services that English Heritage built and maintains for the heritage community. Contributions from the floor drew attention to the power of a thesaurus to cross language boundaries, not to mention image searching, where indexing with a controlled vocabulary still outperforms all the other methods.  

But simply overthrowing the proposition misses the point – the role of the thesaurus in modern Information retrieval has shrunk from what it once was. The high development and maintenance costs of an extensive controlled vocabulary deter most potential implementers. Most users simply do not want to know about such a complicated-looking beast, and so the shy thesaurus needs to perform discreetly but cost-effectively behind the scenes. Given a discerning team of developers, curators, IT support staff and indexers, this sophisticated tool can and should function interoperably alongside statistical algorithms, NLP techniques, data mining, clustering, latent semantic indexing. linked data, etc. Networking and collaboration, not rivalry, are the future.

As the professional body that has grown up around classification, indexing, use of thesauri and other knowledge organization systems, ISKO has a mandate to mark out that future. Follow-up activities could usefully explore:

•           The contexts in which the thesaurus is or is not a useful tool;
•           how to choose between a thesaurus and another type of knowledge organization system;
•           how to integrate a thesaurus with the other components of a modern information retrieval system;
•           how to adapt a standard thesaurus to the needs of special contexts;
•           features of the software needed for thesaurus management.

The knowledge organizer with a grasp of these topics is ideally placed to develop the hybrid vocabulary structures (e.g. a layer of thesaurus model hooked on to upper level ontologies and coated with taxonomy features) needed in today’s networked environments.

Call for Papers - International UDC Seminar 2015: CLASSIFICATION AND AUTHORITY CONTROL: Expanding Resource Discovery

	DATE: 29-30 October 2015
	VENUE: National Library of Portugal
	Campo Grande 83
	Lisbon, Portugal
	WEB: http://seminar.udcc.org/2015/
	CONTACT: seminar2015@udcc.org

Linked data practices and techniques have opened new possibilities in exploiting controlled vocabularies and improving resource discovery. Authority data held in library systems, including classification schemes find new ways of expanding its potential as shared knowledge structures across the linked data environment.

The objective of this conference is to explore such a potential, expanding the value and use of classification as authority controlled vocabulary, from the local perspective to the global environment.

We invite experts in authority control, classification schemes and linked data to provide overviews, illustrations and analysis of classification data management and exploitation. Contributions are welcome on high quality, innovative research and practice on the following topics:

•    Classification as a component of subject authority control
•    Classification authority data formats and modeling
•    Classification and multilingual subject access
•    Sharing classification data from authority files
•    Classification data in the open linked data context

CONTRIBUTIONS:

Two kinds of contributions are invited: conference papers and posters. Authors should submit a paper proposal in the form of an extended abstract (1000-1200 words, including references, for papers; and 500-600 words for posters). The submission form is provided on the conference website.

Proposals will be reviewed by the Programme Committee consisting of an international panel of experts. Each submission will undergo a blind review by at least three reviewers.

The Conference proceedings will be published by Ergon Verlag and will be distributed at the conference.

IMPORTANT DATES

    28 February 2015    Paper proposal submission deadline
    23 March 2015    Notification of acceptance & paper submission instructions
    15 May 2015 Papers submission (camera ready copy)

ORGANIZER: Classification & Authority Control: Expanding Resource Discovery is the fifth biennial conference in a series of International UDC Seminars organized by the UDC Consortium (UDCC). UDCC is a not-for-profit organization, based in The Hague, established to maintain and distribute the Universal Decimal Classification and to support its use and development. UDC is one of the most widely used knowledge organization systems in the bibliographic domain.

Sharing expertise in support of Networked Knowledge Organization Systems

“Small is beautiful” said Ernst Schumacher in 1973. Despite the subsequent trends towards globalization, his note still strikes a chord, echoing strongly at the 13th NKOS Workshop held in London on 11-12 September. Addressing only 20 participants, each of the 9 speakers got the space and audience support to expose real issues arising from their current R & D projects, including practical obstacles such as the weaknesses of tools for handling KOS management and exploitation.
Ceri Binding, for example, had investigated six different products to help with establishing mappings between vocabularies, without finding one that was fully satisfactory. The size of the LOD (Linked Open Data) cloud always impresses - 1048 datasets, 302 vocabularies, and the numbers grow all the time – but problems have been reported with at least 58% of the datasets, such as “503: unavailable” or “404: not found”, and Ceri observed big variations in the quality of the links. Successful Linked Data projects with sustained value for users are plainly less common than our wishful thinking supposes.
All the speakers were clear and straightforward. As usual at the NKOS Workshops, I was very impressed at the amount of knowledge and expertise assembled in the room. If only there was some way of sharing that accumulated experience with all those who struggle in isolation to handle thesaurus or taxonomy development!
The intimate atmosphere made it realistic to engage everyone in discussion. I took the opportunity to report on outcomes from a workshop held jointly by ISKO UK, DCMI and BCS IRSG on 23 June, on “Vocabularies and the Potential for Linkage”, and asked again what could be done about the need for more tools and training. Animated conversation followed, overflowing into the pub afterwards and continuing through to the concluding session next day.
It was hard to find practical, feasible solutions, partly because the community engaged in vocabulary mapping is quite small. Not only that, the term “vocabulary” has different meanings for different groups. The DCMI definition, for example, includes datasets and metadata schemas as well as controlled vocabularies used for subject indexing. This leads to a very wide range of skills and specializations. This diversity of topics and the distance that separates us from co-workers makes it unrealistic to set up affordable training days.
In the NKOS community, at least we can focus on KOSs (Knowledge Organization Systems) as the type of vocabulary to be linked (… though that still includes subject heading schemes, classification schemes, name authority lists and many taxonomies as well as thesauri.) That’s a useful focus for ISKO members too. If we can’t organize formal training sessions, at least we can make use of wiki space and perhaps other social media. In a wiki we could assemble all we know about tools and techniques – or at least pointers to where that knowledge can be found. Workshop participants left resolving to work together by email to make this happen. I shall report on progress via the ISKO-L and ISKO–UK lists.
Finally, remember - this workshop was small but beautiful. See the programme and all presentations at <https://at-web1.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2014/programme.html>.
Stella Dextre Clarke

Chair, ISKO UK

Digital Asset Management Europe 2014 (DAMEU)

I attended this conference on 26th-27th June in London on behalf of ISKO UK, in place of Stella Dextre Clarke, who was unable to attend. The full programme of the meeting, with abstracts of papers is given on the conference web site.

The scope of the concept that is labelled by the term “digital assets” was not defined, but it became clear during the conference that the main emphasis was on pictures, video and audio, prepared for marketing purposes in big organizations. These may amount to hundreds of thousands of items, including, for example, all the images of products included in printed and on-line catalogues, advertising images, sales and training videos, news items, and pictures of people. Marks and Spencer receive 1500 such digital assets per day, coming from many agencies who may be in competition with each other, so that the work of each one has not to be visible to the others. DAM systems are also used in non-marketing applications, such as Kew Gardens, which uses them for scientific purposes as well as for public awareness. The collection of North Wales Police includes fingerprints, scene of crime photographs, mug shots of criminals, CCTV recordings, recordings from video cameras worn by police officers and recordings of interviews, all of which are growing at the rate of 2500 new items per day.

DAM systems are basically information storage and retrieval systems, and their underlying functionality is similar to that of such systems used in other applications. A blog post by Elizabeth Keathley lists ten features of a DAM system, including the essential requirements of version control and workflow processing, recording where a resource has come from and where and when it was used.

These systems depend on metadata being attached to each item, either at the point of creation or later, and if this can be done automatically so much the better. Technical information may be embedded with a picture in EXIF format, for example, and the location may be recorded automatically if the capture device has GIS capability. Embedded information is sometimes lost when an item is edited or transferred to a different system, and it may be better retained in an associated file of metadata, which can also contain fields which are not supported by the embedded format.

Several speakers mentioned the importance of having a “librarian” as part of the team, to manage the metadata and to help create and maintain controlled and structured vocabularies. Very little was said about the nature of these, however, and from the demonstration systems that were exhibited I got the impression that indexing vocabularies were often ad hoc creations without being based on sound principles such as those understood by ISKO.

Many of the presentations were around the problems of procuring a DAM and introducing it into an organization, convincing management that it was needed and convincing potential users to use it. The advantages of a coherent centralised system were pointed out, but several speakers said that they found about forty different digital asset management systems in use in their organizations, and it was not easy to persuade people to give up their personal or departmental systems and transfer their data to a company-wide scheme. As usual, if one department could be convinced and realise the benefits, they could act as a “champion” to enthuse others. It was essential that the end users should take a full part in the procurement process, so that they could feel that the system was the one that best met their needs and that they “owned” it and participated in its development.

Several speakers said how important it was to engage a consultant to help with the procurement process, who could suggest a realistic list of suppliers from the large number of systems available, and work with users to define and prioritise their requirements. In such a fast-changing field, it was essential to choose suppliers in whom the client had confidence that they could work with, and in one case the client and the supplier were asked to share “road maps” of how they saw their systems developing over the next five years, to check that they were in step. One consultant whose advice was mentioned as valuable by two of the speakers was Mark Davey, president and founder of the DAM Foundation. His presentation “DAM will morph into knowledge based platforms” was the only one to acknowledge that wider developments in KOS were applicable to DAM systems, mentioning schema.org and linked open data, for example.

There was a small exhibition of DAM software, including the open source system ResourceSpace. (Other open source packages are listed at Review of available open source DAM software). One of these might be appropriate for ISKO UK’s increasing collection of presentations and recordings from its past meetings.

Metadata Intersections: Bridging the Archipelago of Cultural Memory. Call for Participation.

The International Conference and Annual Meeting of DCMI, 8-11 October 2014 (DC-2014) requests submission of papers on the Conference theme:

Metadata is fundamental in enabling ubiquitous access to cultural and scientific resources through galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM). While fundamental, GLAM traditions in documentation and organization lead to significant differences in both their languages of description and domain practices. And yet, the push is on for "radically open cultural heritage data" that bridges these differences as well as those across the humanities and the sciences. DC-2014 will explore the role of metadata in spanning the archipelago of siloed cultural memory in an emerging context of linked access to data repositories as well as repositories of cultural artifacts.

For further information, see the Conference website.

Open Access Metadata and Indicators

With the advent of Open Access initiatives, the need has arisen to annotate discrete works to indicate the conditions under which they may be accessed and/or re-used. In January 2013, the NISO  Open Access Metadata and Indicators Working Group was charged with developing protocols and mechanisms for transmitting the access status of scholarly works, specifically to indicate whether a specific work is openly accessible (i.e., free-to-read by any user who can get to the work over the internet) and what re-use rights might be available.

NISO is currently seeking comments on the draft recommended practice Open Access Metadata and Indicators (NISO RP-22-201x).

“Use and re-use rights can be difficult to explain in metadata,” states Ed Pentz, Executive Director, CrossRef, and Co-chair of the NISO Open Access Metadata and Indicators Working Group. “By publishing URIs for applicable licenses and including these URIs in the metadata for the content, more detailed explanations of rights can be made available. The metadata can also be used to express how usage rights change over time or point to different licenses for particular time periods, for example when an embargo applies.”

The draft recommended practice is open for public comment through February 4, 2014. To download the draft or submit online comments, visit the Open Access Metadata and Indicators webpage.

Source:
Email dated 06/01/2014 to DC-GENERAL@JISCMAIL.AC.UK from:
Cynthia Hodgson
Technical Editor / Consultant
National Information Standards Organization
chodgson@niso.org

99% Smiles, 1% Sweat, 100% Cotton

At our last two conferences, we have supplied delegate bags made from pure, eco-friendly cotton. These were manufactured by a social enterprise called Vandanamu, whose factory is located near Pondicherry on the coast of southern India. The bags are of very high quality and good value for money. They can be printed with a logo - or logos - of your choice and are available in a range of sizes.

Vandanamu was set up in response to the devastating Boxing Day tsunami which hit the whole region in 2004, with a view to providing a livelihood for some of those hit hardest by the disaster. Last year, the enterprise started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for solar panels, which would have cut their electricity costs significantly and would have made their business far less vulnerable to rising energy costs. Unfortunately, they raised insufficient donations to qualify for the funding.

Nevertheless, Vandanamu continue to consolidate their enterprise by working towards gaining Fair Trade and environmental certifications, allowing them eventually to be featured in Ethical suppliers' databases world-wide.

For more information on a venture well worth supporting, view their video on YouTube.

In Remembrance of Peter Griffiths

It is with real sadness that we note the passing, on 13 November, of Peter Griffiths. Peter had a long career in LIS, starting at Harrow Public Library and progressing through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, then the Department of Health. But many of us who knew him probably came across him during his long tenure at the Home Office, where his latest position was Head of Information within the Office of the Chief Information Officer.

Peter was an enthusiastic and unrelenting advocate for the power of information management, not only within the confines of the library, but in industry and commerce too. It was in his capacity as evangelist that he presented at an early ISKO UK event on 5 March 2008: Confronting the Future - Organizing and Managing Knowledge in the Web 2.0 Age.

Peter was Vice-President of CILIP when he presented to ISKO UK in 2008. The following year, he became CILIP President. Further details may be viewed on the CILIP web site.

Peter will be sorely missed by those who knew him.

K, KM, KO: in Search of Definitions

After 25 years of service on standards committees I suffer from a personal dread of definitions. As chairman of some ISO and BSI working groups, I’ve generally had the job of cajoling all parties into consensus. And the definitions clause has generally proven the most divisive, packed with minutiae to excite the sensibilities of the experts. It usually locks the committee up for weeks of argument. (Sometimes for years – if tough decisions get conveniently postponed while the rest of the work proceeds.)

But the question of definitions seemed not so easy to evade at the NetIKX 21^st birthday celebrations last week. Billed as “Knowledge organization past present and future”, the meeting had two speakers, one talking about “The 7 Ages of IKM in Organizations”, and the other describing knowledge management (KM) issues in an important public sector organization. The title of the second presentation was “The Organisation of Organisational Knowledge”. Despite much use of the K word and the O word, neither of the talks was about what I would describe as Knowledge Organization (KO). Would a productive debate be stimulated by querying the use of “KO” in the meeting title, I wondered, or would the fruitless grinding of axes tear us to pieces?

Thankfully my dilemma was resolved as the meeting began with a clear acknowledgement from the chair that KM, rather than KO, would be the main focus. Both speakers provided entertaining and stimulating presentations. The first, David Skyrme, even supplied his own preferred definition of KM, along the lines of “the explicit and systematic management of vital knowledge and its associated procedures of creation, gathering, organizing, diffusion, use and exploitation in pursuit of organizational objectives”.

But the question of definitions was not completely banished. Plainly NetIKX has listened to umpteen variations on the definitions of “knowledge” and “knowledge management” during its 21 years. In the syndicate sessions after the tea break our table was explicitly charged with discussing definitions. One participant proffered a statement concocted for a recent client, deliberately customized to show the relevance of KM to the client’s own business context. The statement emphasized the functional benefits of KM, rather than attempting an academic definition.

My own reaction to the challenge was to applaud the public sector ploy of side-stepping the issue by bringing “Information Management” and “Knowledge Management” under one umbrella labelled “IKM”. While there’s a legitimate place for pursuing a specialism such as records management, web design, knowledge engineering, etc., there is also a lot to be said for blurring the boundaries so that we work together effectively to achieve common objectives. The study of a specialist subject can help each of us become really proficient in a chosen area, but today’s workplace often requires teamwork, with inputs from diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, the content of each specialism is constantly evolving, especially as we need to master emerging technologies. I therefore favour professional definitions that are inclusive rather than divisive, and are hospitable to change.

A definition of “Knowledge Organization” too should be inclusive, in my view. As an applied subject rather than a fundamental science, KO should be open to new developments and approaches. But I was relieved when I left the NetIKX meeting without being challenged to put a definition on the table! In 2008 the ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization) journal Knowledge Organization devoted the whole of a special issue (see vol 35, no 2-3) to exploration of a definition of this subject field. Despite much debate and discussion, in 2013 the journal still describes its scope in half a page of text rather than a tight definition. The ISKO website, however, provides a link to a useful Wikipedia article, which outlines half a dozen different approaches to KO and lets the reader choose. Is this the best line to take?  Or should we come off the fence and provide a one-liner?  Should we first set up an event for members to come and debate their favourite definitions?  Why not add your own views immediately by commenting on this blog?

Stella Dextre Clarke

Chair, ISKO UK

CILIP’s Information Management Summit and the KO connection

Since the Stone Age or even before, the ability to share knowledge and information has been fundamental to the development of the human race. Just think of how expertise in making flints, then metal tools, pottery, paper and glass revolutionized our life-style as it spread round the globe! And think how the opportunities for exploiting information are now even greater. CILIP has an enviable UK-wide remit to serve our profession across the whole range of information management specialisms. So why, in the information age, is its membership contracting?

For months, activists Martin White and Sandra Ward have been pointing to the needs of business and society, and urging CILIP to grasp the opportunities. Last week their efforts culminated in an Information Management Summit: Towards transforming organisations and our profession. Anne Mauger, CILIP’s Chief Executive, showed clear support for their initiative.

The proceedings

A parade of first-class speakers presented nine different perspectives, starting with a sparkling keynote address from Clive Holtham, Professor of Information Management at City University. (See slides from most speakers, on the Summit site.)  Unsurprisingly, the invited audience of about 40 senior information professionals responded enthusiastically. Kate Arnold, President-elect of the Special Libraries Association, invited all to download a report on The evolving value of information management and the five essential attributes of the modern information professional, commissioned by the Financial Times in conjunction with the SLA. Among other heady stuff the report stresses the importance of “decision-ready information” and invites “an urgent response from information professionals that clearly demonstrates their value to organizations”.

Speaking for CILIP, Annie Mauger promised commitment to supporting its practitioner members in this field. CILIP could not claim to cover every aspect of IM, she felt, nor to be IM’s only voice in the professional society space. But there would certainly be support for the IM Project Board which the organizers are bent on establishing. As follow-up, an open meeting will be held at Ridgmount St on 2nd December. The Board wants to support CILIP members and their organizations in improving IM practice; one component will be to develop and share tools and position papers that IM practitioners can use to influence progress in the workplace. We're all invited to contribute to the Project and make use of the outcomes.

And how does all this bear on Knowledge Organization (KO)?

KO and IM practitioners face many of the same challenges. KO lies at the heart of information management, providing the theoretical underpinning for many IM techniques. As Liane Kordan pointed out in her talk about self-development from librarian to information management consultant, “Some things remain the same…. there’s just more information in different formats and various places. But we still need to classify, with a good understanding of customer needs”.

KO, a field that was founded on the study of classification, is a key thread in the weave of information management. In the picture below, which illustrates how the Institute of Information Scientists and the Library Association merged to form CILIP and carry forward the still evolving IM agenda, KO is the most basic thread originally shared by the IIS and the LA.

Members of CILIP and of ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization) both find their skills and contribution are little known and undervalued – even though KO techniques have applications all around us. If society and the economy are to benefit, we all need to maintain our own self-development and get our voices more confidently heard at top management level. ISKO UK will continue its programme of events to help members share their experiences and learn from others. Its collaboration will continue with UKeiG, IRSG, CILIP, SLA and other bodies interested in information management. News from the IM Project Board will be welcome grist for the mill.

Stella Dextre Clarke

Chair, ISKO UK

Feedback from UDC Seminar "Classification & Visualization:Interfaces to Knowledge"

Posted on behalf of Judi Vernau

I had no idea that Paul Otlet, co-inventor of UDC, was also instrumental in bringing the 5x3 index card to the world. Or that he was an early thinker about levels of granularity within the content of a book, and how you should be able to arrange and re-arrange those contents as required (what would he have made of the term 'information architecture'?). Boyd Rayward's keynote address to the International UDC Seminar on Classification and Visualisation was full of fascinating facts about Otlet and his vision for a World City which would contain a total centralization of all international power and knowledge in one place, in the interests of progress and peace. It's extraordinary to think of Otlet and his colleague Henri La Fontaine putting together their universal bibliography which grew to over 15 million entries, and using it to answer queries from around the world, like a human Google.

There were plenty of other interesting discussions about ways to represent knowledge, but possibly too few actual examples. There were two obvious and very different exceptions to this: Scott Weingart spoke about very early visualisations which most often used the metaphor of a branching tree of knowledge, a tree which over time became very complicated and hard to interpret as knowledge expanded. Scott's accompanying illustrations were lovely. At the other end of the time spectrum, we had Lev Manovich's presentation, abounding with images and video, which showed how computational analysis and visualisation of large data sets can provide some fascinating insights into how an artist's style develops or how the design of magazine cover moves with the times. His video on analysis of Rothko paintings (available at http://manovich.net/research.php ) was fascinating and beautiful to look at.

Over the two days we were treated to many more wonderful images and thoughtful presentations: see particularly http://knowescape.org/ for beautiful colours and www.vizgr.org/sere<http://www.vizgr.org/sere> for an interesting method of relating concepts in a visual and informative way.  The Conference was very well attended - I counted over 100 people, from upwards of 10 countries. This all comes at a time when several of our clients have been asking for more visual representations of taxonomy and other information architecture artefacts, so it was good food for thought. Just never show me another tag cloud.

Judi Vernau, Metataxis Ltd

Classification & Visualization, The Hague, 24-25 October - early bird closes 30 June

International UDC Seminar 2013 entitled "Classification & Visualization:Interfaces to Knowledge" will take place on Thursday 24 - Friday 25 October in the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek), The Hague.

The objective of this conference is to explore cutting edge advances and techniques in the visualization of knowledge across various fields of application and their potential impact on developments in the more main stream bibliographic and documentary classifications. 

Speakers include: W. Boyd Rayward, Lev Manovich, Kathryn La Barre, Fabrice Papy, Marcel Worring, Luca Rosati, Andrea Resmini, Richard Smiraglia, Charles van den Heuvel, Andrea Scharnhorst, Scott Weingart, etc. 

To learn more about the conference programme and to register go to the conference website.

Early bird registration closes on 30th June: 
€180 early bird fee, students €140 (to 30 June) 
€220 regular fee, students €180 

Registration fee covers lunches, refreshments, reception and the conference proceedings book. 

Contact: seminar2013@udcc.org 

We look forward to seeing you in October

UKeiG is now seeking nominations for the 2013 UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award

The UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award is given in recognition of an outstanding practical innovation or achievement in the field of information retrieval. This could take the form of an application or service, or an overall appreciation of past achievements from which significant advances have emanated. The Award is open to individuals or groups from anywhere in the world. The deadline for nominations is Friday 30th August 2013.

Nominations should be for achievement that meets one or more of the following criteria:

• a major and/or sustained contribution to the theoretical or experimental understanding of the information retrieval process;
• development of, or significant improvement in, mechanisms, a product or service for the retrieval of information, either generally or in a specialised field;
• development of, or significant improvement in, easy access to an information service;
• development and/or exploitation of new technologies to enhance information retrieval;
• a sustained contribution over a period of years to the field of information retrieval; for example, by running an information service or by contributing at national or international level to organisations active in the field.

Full details may be found on the UKeiG web pages for the award.

The UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award is sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry Chemical Information & Computer Applications Group and ASLIB: The Association for Information Management.

Loughborough's Department of Information Science to Close

The Department will be replaced by a centre for information management within Loughborough's School of Business and Economics.

In a statement, Loughborough says that the centre will "allow the university to better integrate the strengths it has in research, teaching and enterprise in the department of information science and the School of Business and Economics, and will build on the expertise and reputation of both".

Source: Times Higher Education

IM 1, LIS 0?